Inspired by the Appendix N from the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, Appendix C is an ongoing series of short posts recommending works that have been influential for me as a writer and Dungeon Master.
Dark Age of Camelot was my first MMORPG, and at 10-years-old, I was absolutely addicted. Released in 2001, the now 19-year-old game pits the realms of Albion, Hibernia, and Midgard against one another in a time after King Arthur’s death.
DAoC introduced me to MMOs, set the stage for my interest in TTRPGs, and fostered by Internet addiction. It also immersed me in the worlds of Arthurian legends, Norse mythology, and an admittedly very loose interpretation of the Celtic cycle. At 10, I already knew who the Norse and Greek gods were and new most of the story of King Arthur, but DAoC sealed the deal. I was obsessed.
I learned about obscure gods and monsters and began to see the patterns of how mythologies and cultures interact playout through shared themes, repeated concepts, and even characters with similar attributes. It was also just a lot of fun to play a big, lumbering troll who could call down lightning bolts onto crabs from several yards away and then beat things up with a hammer.
As a storyteller, I learned about conservation of detail. For me, that boxy world with its repetitive soundscape was totally immersive even when it didn’t explain every last detail, in part because it didn’t explain every last detail.
I knew Albion had seen previous rulers long before any NPC mentioned it because there were skeletons that wore legionnaire armor and ruins of strange architecture. Evocative names and simple patterns of behavior built stories without a novel in the quest log.
Some of those stories might have been left vague intentionally or not intended at all, but I was able to intuit a world with complex relations. And I was able to do that because there were blanks left for me to fill.
The game is very different today, with a much smaller audience, but it lives on and recently gained a free-to-play option. I still visit it periodically, but I’ll always look back fondly on my time spent playing as a kid.
chasetriesagain.com 